I'd love a history of Python tooling

I was reading PEP 517, and what came to mind is that I would love to read a history of Python tooling -- what has been attempted, what worked, what didn't. There must be patterns there, and understanding them would make me a better engineer.

Of course, it doesn't have to be Python. But Python would be a good case-study. Remember easy install? And before pip was a thing? distutils2? "nose tests"? So many things have been tried, so many tools come and gone, that there must be lessons there.

Does anything like that exist?